On love, grief and Mahler

IT IS NOW just over two years since Clemency Burton-Hill suffered a catastrophic brain haemorrhage that left her in a coma for 17 days from which she awoke unable to speak, walk or even move the right-hand side of her body.

So, one of the great joys of her show on Radio 3’s Classical Fix (Sunday, midnight) is the simple pleasure of hearing her voice.

Yes, her speech is slow and deliberate these days. But it’s also impassioned. Her love of classical music and the learning she brings to it are still utterly apparent.

That slow deliberation of her speech offers a learning moment for the rest of us too. It requires us to actively listen, to make an engagement with what is being said rather than let it just wash over us. And as Sunday night’s broadcast proved, she has much to say. In the first of two special editions of Classical Fix to mark Mental Health Awareness Week, Burton-Hill talked to psychotherapist Julia Samuel about love, family, mortality and grief and how and where music can fit into the feelings those experiences evoke.

“Your mental health is your health,” Samuel said at one point. Such a simple idea but all too easily overlooked.

Samuel admitted that she wasn’t much of a fan of classical music. Even so, she engaged with the mixtape that Burton-Hill had prepared for her and found herself moved by much of it, particularly Domenico Scarlatti’s Agnus Dei, in which, she said, she heard “the footsteps of time.”

Burton-Hill was just as eloquent. When she spoke about Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder, his song cycle about child mortality, you could hear the emotion in her voice. Her words sped up and then there was an unexpected and really rather thrilling “Oooh.” The noise of it tapped into a well of deep, painful feeling

but was also in itself an expression of Burton-Hill’s own life force.

At which point Samuel then gave us an eloquent, succinct exposition on the cost of being alive. “We never get over grief,” she said. “How do we learn to live with it? And how can we dare to love again and live again? This piece of music allows us to do that because you feel the pain, you express the pain, and, in doing that, that can release you to both heal and grow and live and love.”

But it takes a lot, she added. “Pain is the agent of change and it’s the things you do to block the pain that do you harm over time.”

This was all quite heady and intense for a half-hour conversation in the wee, small hours of the night. But then maybe that’s when these conversations work best.

Listening again to BurtonHill’s pausing speech I was reminded of the comedian Rosie Jones whose speech is similarly affected – in her case due to cerebral palsy – but who has now found a thriving career on TV and radio. And it struck me how the best thing broadcasters can do is, rather than talk about these issues, is let us hear those voices. To their credit, they are.

Meanwhile, on Wednesday morning … In the middle of a discussion about life in prison on

Nicky Campbell’s 5 Live

morning show, one of the former prisoners revealed the thing that he found most challenging about life behind bars. Turns out it was Jeremy Kyle, “because everybody in prison watched Jeremy Kyle and I hated the programme. That was torture for me. There was no way they were going to miss Jeremy Kyle.”

Clemency Burton-Hill suffered a catastrophic brain haemorrhage